A Summons in Bruges
by Silverrodd
Summary: Set one year after the main trilogy, Bartimaeus is summoned once again in Bruges by a person he knows quite well. Here they tend to closure upon what happened one year earlier.- Just a short story, that popped into my head upon rereading the trilogy for a third time.


_**This is the first short fanfiction that I've posted. And I made it more of a sort of closure thing for the series. When you see a number in italics, thats the best I can do for footnotes, but I felt any Bartimaeus story needs them so that's the best I could do.**_

_**Anyways, I hope you like it and as much as I wish it to be true none of these characters are owned by me!**_

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><p>After what seemed like a million years I felt the oh-so familiar pull of my essence being yanked from The Other Place. And I was not happy about this at all. The little fishhooks seemed to dig into my essence and I was powerless to stop it. In the seconds it would take I searched my brain<em>1<em> for a form that I could assume. Something that would benefit me once I struck home in a foreign pentacle. From the feel of the summons I could tell that my new master was a shoddy piece of work at best. This was very inconvenient for him, but not as such for me.

Quickly I decided upon a satisfactory form. With striking speed and creativity I molded my essence into a large serpent-like beast. Flames erupted and licked my sharpened green scales and my eyes were set ablaze likewise. The plumes of smoke escaping from my nostrils curled around the serpent's horns and in a final moment, my essence materialized on Earth.

Before I could let my new master speak or make his presence known I spoke my part. Well, someone's got to the give the poor guy some warning before it's too late. With a voice so tremulous it shook the walls of the building I spoke, "Who _dares_ to summon me? Bartimeaus of Uruk, Sakhr Al-Jinni! It is I who has built the walls of Prague and spoken with Solomon and Ptolemy of old! Cower before me mortal, for I—,"

I stopped all of a sudden as I realized who stood in the pentacle opposite of mine.

"Oh, it's you," I raised a brow_2_ and crossed my scaly arms.

The girl was grinning widely, a gleam in her eye. Examining her appearance, I inhaled deeply, "Tsk, tsk. I'd been wondering if you'd forgotten me already. How long's it been then?"

The girl didn't say anything but she beamed at me with an expression that could have been shock. I couldn't blame her though. I'd have been most offended if she looked at me any other way. For she, first and foremost, was staring at _me_. Such a reaction is normal if they'd known all the wonders that I'd accomplished in my 5000 yearlong lifespan.

All the same, I knew this was different. This kind of shock was more of a "looking at a ghost" kind of shock. Giving a little awkward cough, I began again, "You're looking well."

This was true. Since the last time the I'd seen the girl, her hair had been short and gray. Her face had been slightly aged and lines had been present. This was of course after she visited the Other Place to find _me _of all djinn. But hey, that's what happens when you separate your body from your soul. But the girl that stood before me looked young once again. Her hair had been dyed black again and it hung long, cascading around her face. But it was the eyes that did it: the big wide eyes that stared at me, full of shock and life. Yes, these eyes belonged to no other than that of Kitty Jones.

At last Kitty seemed to snap out of her trance. With a small croak, she replied, "Yes, yes. I suppose I do. It's been a year after all."

"A _year_? Y'know _some _people might have called."

"You know very well why I didn't!" she replied, rather sourly, to my surprise.

"You might feel kind enough to enlighten me, eh?" I asked. By now I had changed into my preferred Ptolemy guise, which must have suited Kitty just fine. I could tell she felt more at ease with this form than my particularly magnificent serpent.

"Oh, don't give me that!" her eyes bore into me, sending shivers down my spine. In all honesty, I thought she was about to cry_3_. "I thought you were dead."

Looking down, I shuffled within my pentacle, "To be honest, I'd thought I was dead at the time too. In fact I would have been if my idiot master hadn't dismissed me at the last minute."

Oh no, that had done it. It was time for my back-patting hand to warm itself up big time. At last Kitty gave in to the tears.

"Stop crying," I tried, feeling rather uncomfortable with the situation, "It's unbecoming of your personality."

"Shut up," she replied harshly, but nonetheless she quickly wiped her eyes with her sleeve, "You promised me you'd come back. You'd promised, Bartimaeus."

With a guilty cough, I stared at the ground, "Well… demons lie."

"Ha. Ha. Very funny," she said, straightening up.

"Wasn't meant to be a joke," I raised a brow and rested my hands on hips in a very Ptolemy style, "Blame Nat, he would have killed me if I'd told ya the truth."

"Oh yeah? What 'bout me then? Yeah sure, by all means, you two go off and die that heroic valiant death you've always yearned for, but at least have the decency not lie to me before you do it!" She said all this very hysterically, mind you.

"Oi, I was against the whole _dying_ thing from the beginning! Not really number one on my to-do list," I reverberated, staring hard at the carefully drawn lines of the pentacle. This conversation was not going as well as I thought it might one day, have gone. At the moment I was looking for any flaws of mistakes Kitty might have made upon drawing the pentacle out. If there were, I'd be out of there before you could cry "magician". Alas, no such luck. On the contrary, this pentacle was significantly better than the last time I was summoned by the girl. She'd had practice…

"All the same," Kitty's voice trailed off in thoughts of the past.

Rather put off by the previous episode, I sat down, cross legged and looked up at her after adjusting my loincloth, "Anyways, you rang?"

With look, she copied my gesture and sat down in her pentacle as to face me evenly, "Huh?"

"The summoning. Why'd you summon me? Is something wrong?"

She shrugged and twiddled her fingers thoughtfully before responding, "No reason."

"No reason?" I echoed, rolling my eyes, "I would expect that from Natty-boy but surely not an action-orientated girl such as yourself."

"Alright then. I guess I had always been hoping that one of you was still alive. That you'd somehow escaped. I'd merely been gathering up the courage to try summoning you, just to see if you were alive. But I was only hoping. It was all I had to go on. I don't know what I'd have done if I lost that hope. So there, there's your answer. I suppose you can go now." Her eyes didn't meet mine for a long while after this.

I nodded slowly and closed my eyes before looking around at the room we were both in at the moment. It was a shabby abode if I'd ever seen one. The rafters hung low from the ceiling and dust fell off in waves. Cobwebs hung even lower than the rafters and my eyes had caught the sight of a spider scuttling behind a plank of wood. As if out of habit I quickly checked the creature out on all seven planes before relaxing when a spider shown on each one._4_

"Am I correct to assume the magicians are treating commoners no different than before?" I asked, still frowning at the state of her 'home'.

She gave a little chuckle and shook her head, seeing where I was looking, "No, this isn't _my _home. I'm in Bruges at the moment."

I raised a brow in curiosity, "What are you in _Bruges_ for?"

"I'm visiting Jakob_5_," she looked at me and frowned, "But it still doesn't mean that things are any different in London as before."

"I figured as much," I sighed, "I guess it's gonna take a lot more than a bloodthirsty spirit given free reign and a number of casualties for the magicians to change their ways. Stubborn bunch, they are. Well, we gave it our best shot, eh?"

"Apparently not good enough," Kitty scowled. Her features were hardened and she looked tired. Perhaps she hadn't really recovered from her trip after all. I kept quiet about this however. Call it, a small observation.

"Well what of Nathaniel's sacrifice?" I asked, staring at nothing in particular, "I suppose they'd have built a statue of him by now."

"You should see it. They got his toilet plunger cuffs spot on!" Kitty had managed a weak smile upon recalling the vast statue that stood tall in the middle of London, "Mind you, it was built purely for propaganda reasons. Trying to make their government look a better after… everything that happened."

I thought about her words and a smile crept onto Ptolemy's face, "I hope they haven't gone and made the boy any uglier than he already was, poor thing, with a face like that."

I half expected some indignant protest to come from somewhere in the room at this. But that was nonsense, of course. The boy was dead, and so were all the indignant protests that went with it. Sighing, I shook these troublesome thoughts from my head, "Looks like my master got what he wanted though, eh? His face, plastered in the middle of London for all to see?"

"Perhaps so. I'm sure that's what he had wanted at first. But I feel as if he wanted something else towards, well you know, the end," Kitty was staring far ahead, detached from time itself.

"You reckon?" I looked at her.

"Yes, I do. It was always John Mandrake who required fame and recognition. But in the end, I didn't watch _John Mandrake_ run off toward Nouda and his death. I saw someone else entirely. Someone I wish I'd had known better, I suppose that's who Nathaniel was. That's who I miss."

For a long while we both sat there in silence. We were both too deep in thought to have said anything else. At long last, Kitty stirred and made clear her intention of dismissing me. I merely nodded, figuring that she'd summon me again some other time for a more uplifting chat.

We both stood, I in silence while she spoke the words of dismissal. While I felt the pull of my essence leading me back to the Other Place I pondered Kitty's last words. I couldn't have said any of that better myself. There were times of course that I had lost all hopes that the boy _Nathaniel_ existed anymore. Times when I was sure he was only a memory. But there were also subtle things that peaked my interest. Such as when he had dismissed my when I had "made a fool of him" at Devereax's party. He'd saved me then instead of sending me off to be interrogated by some arrogant magician. A purely "Nathaniel" move if I'd ever seen one.

But it was at the end that I finally saw the boy that had first summoned me about eight years ago. And in truth, I would have been happy to die along side (or rather within) him. But, what is life, if not a race for, ultimately, an inevitable fate? No, Nathaniel had saved me again at his own peril. Nathaniel's last gift. And I intended to run my race for as long as I could because of it.

1 _I say this loosely, because strictly speaking, I don't necessarily have a brain. Nope, just essence in here._

2 _Figuratively of course,_ _let's just pretend serpents can raise a brow for a moment shall we? I forgot how literal-minded you humans are._

3 _I was happy she restrained herself. I've never been particularly adept at human psychology. The most I could offer was a good ol' reassuring pat on the back. And even that, I couldn't do from within this pentacle. But hey, I try!_

4 _Ahh, the seven planes. Look, I've gone over this so many times with you lot before. How about you do a little work for once and look it up yourselves._

5 _I admit, I'd almost forgotten about that sorry sap of a boy. I should probably pay him a visit. Hey, maybe we'd meet upon better circumstances this time._


End file.
